Critical issues presentations/Going up the country: how to have moult attendees to your workshops
- Submission no. 125
- Title of the submission
Going up the country: how to have moult attendees to your workshops
- Author of the submission
- Lea Lacroix
- Nicolas Vigneron
- Country of origin
France; France
- Topics
Projects
- Keywords
- local group
- workshop
- improvement
- Abstract
Do you know this feeling when you set up an event and that nobody attends ? "La NCO", the Western France local group, has been holding monthly workshops about Wikipedia & sister projects since 2012. But almost every time we face the same issues: attendees are sparse and the edit counter remains low event after the workshop.
How could we make people interested in our events? We changed the venue, involved partners, swapped formats and finally came with the idea of settling where people are instead of expecting them to come to us: moving close to their living places, travelling to the countryside. During this talk, we will explain how we managed to find new attendees by leaving the city and working with local organizations.
Whereas we take care of our attendees during the workshop and make sure that they feel confortable with Wikipedia and the editing tools, why don't people come back on the project to edit new articles? This presentation will analyse both the question and the answers, suggesting that waiting for edits may not be the final target of our actions. What if the most important lesson they learn during the event is not how to edit Wikipedia, but to understand how the project is running, and what is its philosophy, and beyond, the social changes that involve an encyclopaedia to which everyone can add content? We will also make a feedback about thematic workshops, how to attract people by organizing events into places that are rarely open to public, and other tips we experimented.
- Result
Not accepted